Eighteen comments

Dance of the Honeybees

This tune is acutally a barndance or "german," rather than a reel, from the Altan cd Blackwater. I don’t own the cd, but have heard Altan play this in concert. There’s lots of room for variations—moving the triplets around between measures 1 and 2 (and also 5 and 6), or playing some of the "GFG" phrases as turns or even just a simple G2 G…. Barndances are proof that lift or lilt is as important as drive in any players quiver of skills—the difference between "lively" and just fast. Dance of the Honeybees goes well at a moderate, jaunty pace, lightly, and with as much attention to the spaces between notes as the notes themselves.

Dance of the Honeybees

Waltz and Hornpipe

Prof. Lennon actually wrote two pieces called Dance of the Honeybees that go together. The first is a slow waltz that is been played by Sharon Shannon on "Each little Thing". The second is the hornpipe.
Maire O’Keefe plays both together on her CD "Coisir - House Party".

I like to play it together with "The Wee Rabbit" by Deanta’s Rosie Mullholland as the second tune.

Dance Of The Honeybees

Will, why is it that you call this a barndance? Isn’t it just a straightforward hornpipe? On my liner notes for Blackwater, it says it’s a "hornpipe composed by Charlie Lennon". I’m not correcting you or anything, I’m just asking cuz I don’t understand the difference.

I’ve been getting the same puzzled look from Zina lately. As far as I know, Mr. Lennon himself thinks of this tune as a hornpipe. But I play it smoothed out quite a bit—not as much as a reel (as some people play hornpipes), and still with a hint of the dotted rhythm, but more like a barndance. I’m sure that makes it perfectly clear :-|

Dance of the HBs also lacks that characteristic hornpipe ending of three quarter notes in the last bar of each part.

Too quaint? LOL. Hornpipes don’t have to have that 3-note ending though do they? I play this tune with quite a lot of swing, but then my setting’s quite different from yours Will. I remember posting a discussion a while back asking what barndances were as opposed to hornpipes, and didn’t get much of any use out of the thread, apart from one comment from Brad who tried to explain it to me. What I now understand to be a typical "barndance" is like a hornpipe with less notes in and with that 3-note pattern all over the place - not just at the end, like for example Vincent Broderick’s "Around The Fairy Fort". Do you play that one? If that’s what a barndance is, then I think I’ve nailed what the difference is. If not, then I’m stumped…

Hornpipe / barn dance

Dear Chums

I think the discussion on this tune shows up the problems that arise when one starts to forget that this music is DANCE music and the best tunes (even the modern compositions) are those that speak to people as dance tunes rather than as melodies - no matter however clever or pyrotechnical.
The hornpipe is a very ancient dance form and most of it is now forgotten in the mists of time. Most hornpipes used in traditional dancing are used for various Set Dances. The Barn Dance tune has a quality that would be hard to define but is immediately recognisable to those who enjoy that dance form. The word ‘lift’ was a good clue. Charle Lennon definitely wrote his tune tune as a hornpipe but it is definitely a cracking tune for a barn dance. A march, jig, hornpipe, reel or other forms can all be used for barn dances. Marches or jigs can be used for the Gay Gordons. And so on.
It’s a matter of clearly distinguishing between the musical form and the dance form that it is being used for. The same melody could be played in different ways for a reel, a rant, a hornpipe or a schottische. It’s amatter of having feeling for what the dancers need. What a dancer prefers and what a musician prefers in a tune do not always coincide. Not all well know professional fiddlers could play five hours for dancing. Their repertoire often avoids the real dance tunes as the insistent regular rhythms become boring to them.
Never play in a band with clever bassists, drummers or rhythm guitarists. They want to vary things too much to keep themselves awake and develop their virtuosity. If they all happen to take off at the same time then the dancers fall over or stand around in puzzlement.
Toodlepip.
Pierce

Bienentanz

The Dance of the Honeybees seems to have been first described and understood -if not first observed- by Karl Von Frisch, an Austrian gentleman who lived for nearly a hundred years. His work led to an experimentation, 4 years after his death in 1986, with a mini dancing robot which managed to communicate with the bees through a number of different steps!

Dance Of The Honeybees

Several people have mentioned this tune yet it wasn’t here. It’s by Charlie Lennon. We learned this in a workshop with Siobhan Kennedy twathree years ago. It’s quite hypnotic, once played never forgotten.